Hello again. I’ve recently received 2 Bitforce SC Jalapenos in my mail. One of them worked, the other didn’t. I tried every configuration, cable, etc… it just refused to work (if you have the same problem read to the end, my solution involves the fan).

I received a RMA ticket from Butterfly Labs but didn’t want to send it back, so I tried to repair it myself by flashing it (WARNING: this will void your warranty).

Well, it didn’t matter which image I chose it always failed with a “verification error” message, at different flash memory addresses. With that behaviour I arrived at the conclusion that the board must have a faulty power regulator so I

Disconnected the external power and used another jumper to connect the “pin 1” from the Pi to the “pin 4” on the Jalapeno JTAG. This gives the interface a 3.3V tension from the Pi.

I tried again to flash it with this new jumper connected (no external power) and the flashing worked!!! 🙂

I tried the new firmware and the cube now works. Even more, at 8GH/s it’s faster than the other one.

BUT, I had disconnected everything and was testing the board with just the cooler. As soon as I plugged the fan again (power it off when doing this) it didn’t work again. So now my conclusion is, either the power regulator or the fan is/are faulty.

I now have it out of the box in a cool spot and it works just fine, though very hot. 😉

No RMA needed! 😀 😀 😀

BFGMiner Jalapeno @8GH/s

UPDATE:

I actually closed the cube now and it’s working. I forgot to tell you: I was in a hurry one morning and connected the fan without powering down the unit. I actually blew a capacitor but it still works so far. 😀 So flash away and don’t RMA.

This one is on installing a recovery mod that you’ll need to backup your data before the last tutorial (increasing the phone’s internal storage)

The original ROM that comes with the phone already has a version of Clockworkmod installed but you can’t navigate it and it doesn’t work with “ROM Manager” (by the way, if you use this app to install the mod you’ll brick your phone ;)).

I recently acquired a chinese Zopo C3 smartphone. I’m very happy with it so far, but I’ve had to fiddle with it sometimes to fix things I didn’t like (the GPS not receiving any signal and increasing the internal memory size – I’ll publish tutorials for achieving this as well). Well, the first thing I’ve had to do was to root it. Here’s the easiest method I found.

First, activate USB debugging in the phone and connect it to your computer. It should install the “My HTC” driver automatically.